


The Only One

by forgetyouinsiberia



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:06:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1523915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgetyouinsiberia/pseuds/forgetyouinsiberia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No Way Out, the way it SHOULD have ended. Loosely based around Parachute’s lovely song ‘The Only One’. Plenty of fluff and subtext!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only One

 

 

_“Standing by the bedroom door, staring at an empty face_  
 _I can see it in your eyes, some things you can never change_  
 _Nothing else that I could do, while I’m waiting for the end to come_  
 _I know that you’re gonna walk away, but you should know that you’re the only one.”_  
 _-The Only One,_ **Parachute**

Silence clings to his ears as he drifts into the office, stares at Scottie in the chair. It seems like they’re constantly finding themselves in this position--her looking defeated, and him telling her what she doesn’t want to hear. It’s not fair, really. It just seems to **be**.

“Hey.” Harvey’s voice drifts across the room softly as he stares at her. It captures Dana’s attention, and she turns her head, looking up towards him.

“Hey,” she says back. Her voice sounds resigned, and it’s like a kick in the teeth because God knows he already feels like shit standing in this room, knowing the conversation they’re about to have. Haven’t they had it a hundred times before now?

“You want a drink?” He asks as though it’ll lessen the blow, though more for himself than her.

“They do it on _Mad Men_ , right?” She comments, throwing his words from that morning back at him. Harvey sighs with a nod and turns towards the bar cart. He lifts the unmarked bottle filled with the amber liquid slowly, taking an extra few seconds mostly for himself. Because he knows after this conversation, he and Scottie will likely cease to exist in each other’s lives. Not out of hatred. Not out of contempt. No. It will just be, just so simply and yet irritatingly complicatedly caused by life’s twisted puzzle.

He fills two tumblers with a finger’s worth of the liquid and then turns, inhaling a deep breath.

“Jessica and I are gonna let you out of your non-compete.” He means it sound more like an announcement, but it’s littered with so much subtext of _I’m sorry, and please don’t hate me because I’m a stupid asshole that keeps fucking things up in this_ that it just sounds sad.

“What about the buy-in?” She asks as he reaches the desk and passes her one of the tumblers. Part of Harvey is surprised she cares; it’s his money after all. But then, why should he be? It’s not her constantly screwing this up--at least not this time around--it’s him.

“We’ll take care of the buy-in,” he responds with a dismissive shake of his head. He wants to tell her not to worry about it. Wants to tell her that it’s not her problem anymore; wants to find a way to just put a bandaid over all of this before the knot that’s formed in his throat leads to actual tears.

But she grants him a moment of dignity, and he’s thankful for her on an entirely new level as her eyes drop to the tumbler between her fingers.

“Harvey, I uh--”

“Mike Ross never went to law school,” he admits. “I knew it and I hired him anyway.”

Dana looks back up at him, clearly searching for the words to properly respond because really, this is what she’s wanted all along--isn’t it? “Why are you telling me now?”

His throat feels even tighter now, with all the words building up on the tip of his tongue, and he wants desperately to tell someone, anyone what’s been building his head these past few days, but he knows Dana isn’t the right one. So instead he says what he **should** , instead of what he’d like to.

“Because you accused Jessica of being Edward Darby.” There’s a pause, and he shakes his head at himself. “It wasn’t her. It was me.” A knowing, guilty smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth, but he’s so weary of the charade he’s been doing and so **terrified** of what’s to come, that it’s barely a tug at the corners of his mouth.

Dana nods, staring down into the tumbler again, biting her bottom lip and clearly trying to keep herself pulled together in the present moment. Finally, she looks back up at him.

“I still can’t stay, Harvey.” She gives him a resigned smile--a last-ditch effort in keeping herself together in this broken mess of a conversation that’s supposed to be him apologizing and setting her free.

He nods, moving forward towards the edge of the desk and perching against it. “I know.”  
  
Dana shakes her head, and as she does, the first tear finally falls. She reaches up and places the tumbler on the desk, and the soft clatter of glass against glass is louder than it ought to be, but there’s few people left in the building.

She stands before him, and shakes her head repeatedly, clearly trying to find some dignity and not let this moment completely tear her apart, because she’s not this woman. Harvey **knows** she’s not this woman. Not the woman who breaks in front of a man who’s letting her go.

“I just-”

“No, Harvey.” Dana looks him clear in the eyes, lifting her small hands to his face. She splays her fingers across his cheeks, her index fingers resting on his temples. “You don’t. You don’t know. And the more you don’t, the more I keep trying to convince myself that I’m just seeing things, and if I try hard enough, that you can love me just as much.”  
  
He stares at her, bewildered as to what she’s referring to. His lips part, but he’s not even sure what question to ask, and a small laugh drifts from her mouth as more tears fall.

“I keep coming into this like it’s a battle, and the prize is you,” she explains. Her words should be dripping with anger--Harvey can see that clearly in expressiveness of her eyes--but her voice is soft, guiding like she’s trying to show him what she sees.

“But every time I get here, I put up as much of a fight as I can, and I still hit a wall every time. It’s always the same one, too.”

Harvey’s brow furrows, and he tries to recall their previous altercations, but the best he can come up with is the cheating thing and his mother. “My mom-”

Dana shakes her head again. “No, Harvey.” She pauses for a beat, and it’s clear she wants him to think. Still, he come’s up empty.

“It’s him,” she says. “It’s always him. And it always will be.”

He stares at her like she’s spoken to him in another language, but she’s finally finished. She leans forward and kisses him on the corner of his mouth where his lips meet his cheek and then she pulls her hands free from his face and she walks out of the room.

Harvey sits in that spot, utterly bewildered for several minutes. By the time he manages to muster up a response--still in confusion--to what she’s said, Dana is long gone. He breathes another sigh and then heads out of the room, passes through the hall and walks down into his office.

When walks in, Donna is perched on the counter in front of the window overlooking the city behind his desk, moving one of his signed baseballs around the the top of it, letting her fingers dance lightly and lazily over it. Harvey lifts a hands in surrender.

“I told her.”  
  
Donna gives a small nod. “I know.”

“She won’t tell anyone,” he adds.

Donna nods again. “I know.”

“She’s leaving.”

Again, she nods. “I know.” Her gaze stays over him for a long minute, and Harvey wants to ask why, but he doesn’t have the energy. Instead, he drops into the leather chaise, pinching the bridge of his nose with the desperate hope it’s going to bring him the clarity he needs.

“Harvey.”

He glances up at Donna.

“You’re a good man.”

He looks at her as though he wants to laugh at her statement. “Am I?” _Am I_ _**really**_? “I turned Quelling into the bar. I took my rage out on him. He didn’t deserve it. And Mike...” He shakes his head at himself, staring out of the glass windows of his office, at a random spot on the carpet.

“Which is why I stopped it,” Donna replies. Harvey glances back at her with an arsenal of questions ready, but she beats him to it. “And you never **forced** Mike to take the job, Harvey.”  
  
Harvey’s wordless for a few seconds, but he shakes his head. “I’ll come back to Mike in a minute, but what’re you talking about?”

“Do you seriously think Stephanie Liston is the only person who owes me a favor?” She responds, though it’s clearly a quick answer to get back to what she really wants to talk about. But Harvey responds anyway.

“That doesn’t make me a good man. That makes you a good man for me.”

It should sound like a compliment, but it’s more of a dismissal of her praise. He closes his eyes for a beat, breathes.

“Harvey,” she says coaxingly. “Sometimes we need a little help. Mike needed your help then. It’s not wrong to need his help now.”

Harvey opens his eyes and looks back at Donna. He inhales a deep breath--considers the speech he’s had boiling up inside him since that minor stand-off with Mike in the AG’s interrogation room--and instead just exhales a shaky breath. Every nerve ending feels too sensitive, and he’s pretty sure any touch might actually crack him. And **that** thought is laughable. The _**great** _ Harvey Specter so easily broken down by a twenty-nine year-old _technically_ uneducated lawyer.

“I failed him, Donna. I was his superior then, and I have been all along. I wanted to be cocky and do what no one else could, and I’ve been screwing it up every step since.”

“Harvey.” She says his name insistently, but he doesn’t move. She stands from her place by the window and walks towards him, and Harvey finally dares a look up, if only to keep her from touching him; to keep her from breaking down this thin barrier holding him up.

Donna stares at him the way he’d half-expect a feline to--as though she’s observing him and picking apart every movement.

Harvey exhales a frustrated sigh and shoves up from the seat, heads for the door. He’s got his hand on the handle and the door cracked open when she finally speaks.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you can’t win a fight if you don’t try, Harvey. Everybody knows but him.”

.,.

When Harvey reaches the associates bullpen, the light is so dim that he can barely make out Mike’s silhouette from the doorway.

“Big day.” He tries to sound casual, as though they’ve celebrated a milestone birthday, and not Mike being arrested and nearly charged with defrauding the US government.

“ _Horrible_ day,” Mike admonishes.

“It ended well,” Harvey says, although he’s not sure who he’s trying to convince. He heads towards Mike’s cubicle.

Mike nods, staring down at the monitor in front of him--the one with the words **PEARSON SPECTER** blazing back at him in silver block lettering. “Thank you. You and Louis really came through.”

“So did you,” Harvey replies as he reaches the small boxed-in area and perches on a corner of desk space. He opens his mouth, tries once again to find a way to piece the words together the right way, and then just...breathes them away. “Look, I know what you’re thinking.”

“No you don’t,” Mike shakes his head.

“You don’t want to go to jail,” Harvey says, as though he’s sure that’s what’s in Mike’s head. And really, hasn’t that **always** been in Mike’s head? If nothing else, it’s the obvious answer, right?

“Harvey.” Mike finally turns to look at him, saying his name in the same tone that Donna and Dana did, and in the seconds before he speaks, he looks so entirely lost in the moment and shattered by it. In another life where Harvey has more faith in love and and belief in the idea that maybe he actually gets to win at **everything** in life, he’s sure that’d be the moment he’d jump up and put everything into a storybook-ending kiss. But instead, he just lets Mike speak.

“I sat in that room today and listened to you tell me that ever since the day we met, you’ve had to cross one line after another and-”  
  
”Mike-” He tries to stop Mike from finishing his statement because **_God damn it_** he’s actually feeling his heart twist and turn in knots he didn’t know were possible. He’s feeling the façade crumble with each passing second and word, and he wants to scream, but the sound is dead in his mouth.

“No, just, let me finish,” Mike insists. “First it was Clifford Danner, then the witnesses, then suborning perjury, not to mention the seventeen things we did to stop the merger in the first place. All of it since you hired me.”

“That’s not what I said,” Harvey tries to dismiss, but the knot in his throat is killing the insistence behind it.

“Yes it is,” Mike tells him, and he says the words like it’s Harvey he’s got to convince, not himself.

“I wasn’t blaming you for those things,” Harvey tries.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mike replies softly. “I’m tired of putting the people I care about in jeopardy.”

Harvey knows the words that are coming after that, and all at once he’s feeling his chest cave in while Mike tells him he took the job with Jonathan Sidwell.

There are all those words again; everything he wants to say, and they’re all tripping over one another, trying like mad to get out of his mouth as though he’ll actually let them. They’re so jumbled, he doesn’t even know where to begin, and with a passing breath, and then another, the best he can manage is, “We just got out.”

“Harvey, you gave me permission to point the finger at you,” Mike reminds him. He nods in resignation at the moment, and then looks the older man in the eyes once more. “Give me permission to go.”

Harvey stares at him for a good minute, once again pushes down all the words trying to escape his mouth, and rises from the desk. The briefest second passes, where he thinks he can manage a decent statement, but his head just wants to end it with don’t go, don’t leave me and he swallows the words instead before lifting his right hand in an offer. Of what, he’s not entirely sure. Mike stares at Harvey’s extended hand for a moment, and then lifts his own hand and shakes Harvey’s.

“You’re a good man, Harvey.”  
  
If it was physically possible, Harvey’s sure his body would literally start falling to the ground in jagged pieces at the passing of those words across Mike’s lips, but instead his heart just drops to his feet. He thanks Mike for the statement, and a few seconds later, the handshake is over.

It takes every ounce of strength Harvey has left in him to step away from Mike and then step around him, but as he does, their knuckles graze over one another’s, and Harvey can’t do it anymore. He can’t keep it all buried just under the surface and make it through one more compliment before Mike walks out the door and they’re just done. So instead, he’s turning, pulling Mike with him and grabbing the left lapel of Mike’s suit jacket and grabbing the back of Mike’s neck, and there are lips upon lips, teeth clashing, and struggle for dominance all over the board.

And there’s the clarity of what Dana was referring to. The fight that no one ever wins when he’s asked to choose against Mike.

In the seconds after that, he’s waiting to be shoved away, expects it. But instead, there’s pause in Mike’s movements in those seconds, and then his hands are over Harvey’s, and once again Harvey waits to be shoved back. He’s sure at this point Mike is going to deck him, that this can’t end well for the associate’s pen.

But there’s just that pause, and then Mike’s hands are tighter against Harvey’s, holding him to that spot. And then the kiss becomes so hungry that Harvey’s not sure who is dominating it. He just squeezes Mike tighter to him, as though letting go means letting Mike go completely.

Of course, eventually he runs out of air, and eventually has to turn his head to catch a breath. He’s sucking in gasps, and it’s all he can do not to groan as Mike’s five o’clock shadow grazes his own, and the younger man’s mouth claims a spot on his jaw. The last thing Harvey wants to do is let go, but he knows he has to introduce words back into this conversation.

“Mike-”  
  
Mike lifts back up and kisses Harvey again, but Harvey leans back, putting space between them with both his hands on Mike’s chest. Mike looks at him with a confused expression.

“Harvey, what the hell?”

Harvey stares Mike clear in the eyes, gives pause long enough to be clear on the fact that they’re focused on the present moment before he speaks.

“What about Rachel?” Harvey asks.

Mike shakes his head. “It’s done.”

It occurs to Harvey that he should ask for how long and why, but he doesn’t really have merit to, when he’s technically been broken up with Dana for a whole twenty minutes. Still, he knows what Rachel was--and may still be--to Mike.

“You just moved in with her,” Harvey reminds Mike. “The apartment you got for-”  
  
”I know,” Mike replies, and his eyes are level with Harvey, making it clear he’s aware of what he’s saying. “But after the past few days...There was fighting, and...” His voice trails off, and he shakes his head.

“And what?” Harvey asks.

“And I always choose you,” Mike responds, looking back up into Harvey’s eyes.

Harvey shouldn’t be happy. He knows he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be smiling at Mike, shouldn’t even be thinking that this is a good thing. But he can’t not, because he’s not losing Mike. If anything, he’s gaining him in another aspect. And he can’t not smile about that.

“What’re you gonna do?” Harvey asks.

“Probably stay in a hotel for a few days. She’ll probably leave...and then, I don’t really know.” Mike says. “Sell it? Move somewhere else. I don’t really know.”

“Come home with me,” Harvey says even though he shouldn’t. It’s a terrible way to start something, and breaks just about **all** of his personal rules for entering into a personal relationship with someone, but it’s Mike, and he doesn’t want this to end right now. He needs this moment to last a while longer.

“Harvey, I don’t know...”

“I’m not saying you’ve gotta do anything,” Harvey comments as though he’s insulted at what Mike might be implying. “I’m offering you a better situation than a hotel. I **do** have a guest room.”

Mike raises an eyebrow at him, and Harvey can’t help a cheeky smile.

“Or?” Mike badgers lightly.

Harvey shrugs like it’s no big deal. “Or there’s spare room in my bed. Whichever you prefer.”

Mike bites down on the inside of his lip in a way that makes Harvey growl both inwardly and outwardly, because it makes him want to do things to, with, and for Mike.

“We can work out all the specifics later,” Harvey says after Mike can’t seem to make a choice. “As long as we can leave now. It’s been a long day.”

Mike finally seems to reacquaint himself with the present moment, and he nods. He picks up his bag and slings it across his chest as Harvey rounds the cubicle back to the aisle. He pauses for a moment and looks up at Mike.

“When’s your last day?”

Mike shrugs. “Not sure. Why?”

“Wanna take you to dinner,” Harvey replies, like it’s no big deal at all. Except that it totally is. And they both know it.


End file.
